How People Work: Reflection Blog
Elise Chapman & Olivia Luk
Each person is almost like a wicked problem, albeit without the “problem”. They are the combination of all unique parts, which have their own nested parts, that come together to create one opinionated human being. When we design, we cannot address the entire wicked problem (or “wicked” person) at once but we can target specific areas. Although each person is different, there are shared experiences that all people have and we, as designers, can target the shared experiences or worldviews.
Coming out of our first reflections, our main takeaways were about the nuanced universality that design presents. Design takes a vast world of different views, emotions, and experiences and analyses the pieces through the lenses of design research and creative processes. Using these tools, not only the individual products that designers design are influenced, but ultimately, how our world is designed. In our more recent classes, we’ve focused on human emotion, cognition and worldviews. This has added another layer of nuance and complexity to our first reflection takeaways, and have highlighted the great power, and in turn, responsibility we hold as designers in creating equitable futures.
We really liked the lecture Jonathan Chapman gave on Design and Emotion. Emotion is something that we’re both interested in, but, in the realm of design, emotion has always felt a bit arbitrary. However, Professor Chapman’s lecture showed us that emotion is something that you create, not something that you rely on. Chapman pointed out the misconception that design is to design out all negative emotions through his discussion of meaningful associations, episodic memory, and overall, personal human experience. People are not machines; they are nuanced, complex, and seek richer experiences, and as designers we must respond to that nuance. A good example of this was with the image association exercise we did during lecture. We both had very different emotional reactions to the objects shown to us, revealing that at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the designer’s intended response is–it is the user’s personal experience that shapes their reaction. There’s no formula to make people feel a certain way, and, as designers, it’s unhealthy to approach designing in such a cookie cutter way.
If we are thinking about experience we must recognize everyone’s experiences. This idea reminds us of Hillary Carey’s lecture on design for social justice, another lecture that we were both especially drawn to. Carey talked about how to use design to mitigate the perpetuation of racism and oppression, prompting the questions: Who are we designing for? What are our biases as designers? Because design shapes behavior and design is shaped by behavior, often our implicit biases from living in a world with systemic racism influences our design, so inequality is further designed into our structures. Becoming aware of this vicious cycle as a designer is very eye opening to us and is something we now aim to unlearn and think actively about in our designs.
We think that this class is giving us the necessary tools to be more caring and thoughtful as designers, but also in a way we can apply to our work. It’s easy to fall into a trap of being complacent as a designer, but to be truly great, we need to deeply consider both our worldviews as designers and the worldviews of those we are designing for.
